"Ave!" (Hail)

It began as an ordinary day, POSSLQ and I wandered down to the Vatican just to see what was going on. She had plans to visit a bookstore and I grabbed a beer and wandered around looking at various hokey, "Made in China" geegaws that I might consider taking home to give to friends (No, not you!). It wasn't too crowded, but there were the usual groups of tours. I've put one photo there on the left just because the colored hats are a typical way of identifying who your group is and where it might have gone, should you lose track of it.

Also please note that everyone is in T-shirts and jeans and the sun is shining brightly in the back ground. About 15 minutes after this I was sitting with the POSSLQ under a tarp and wondering where the sun had gone and why it was sprinkling rain?

But that question didn't last long, as the next one came along -- and that one was a doozy. "Why is it absolutely pelting down enormous pieces of hail, in Italy, in June?" People scampered for cover (thank God Bernini added that columnar area), the vendors quickly covered their wares, and the horse-drawn carriages, which have enough trouble on the cobblestones when everything is dry all pulled over to the curb. It was actually a kind of festive event, since it was so rare.

You can see in that picture to the right exactly how furiously the hail was falling. This lasted about 15 minutes, at which point the hail reverted to rain and the hail on the ground melted. But while it came down it was pretty impressive, the lightning and thunder had something to do with that, and when it concluded the POSSLQ and I scooted off to have lunch. Before we did that we snapped a picture of one of the hailstones laying on the enormous, spatulate-fingered ham-fists the POSSLQ has by way of hands. This gives some idea of how big the things were (the hailstones, not the POSSLQ's impossibly large hamhocks with fingers attached).

We had lunch in a Chinese restaurant we had noticed the day before. One of the ubiquitous tour-busses was parked on the sidewalk in front of this place and the entire Red-Chinese Army decanted and entered. Thus it came as a bit of a surprise to us when we got inside the place and it had, perhaps, ten tables total. I have no idea how they fit everyone the day before. Possibly there is a floor downstairs that I missed - several other tourist restaurants here have that kind of layout. The food was good and plentiful and we brought home several dishes for the refrigerator. But I'm still confused as to where they stacked all of those chinamen ("Dude, Chinamen is not the preferred nomenclature.")

The woman who ran the place was trilingual, if you count answering "OK" to any question, statment, or comment we made as good English. I did notice that there were no chopsticks in evidence, which was fine with me. The only other notable thing about the place is that it had, like all small restaurants in Italy that I've been in, a full bar stacked in a corner, and a toilette the size of a postage stamp. I was conveniently able to capture both of these features in one ultra-thrilling photograph which I took while the POSSLQ was face down in her sweet and sour kitten.

For the remainder of the day we sat around and planned out what was left of our trip and in the afternoon I made my way down to the Steve McQueen Pub and Bar (much more of a bar than a pub) where the POSSLQ and I sucked down drinks and talked to the impossibly charming bartender who spoke quite good English and apparently had far more friends in the United States than I could ever hope to have.

I drank too much, and then staggered home to sleep it off before our next big day at the Italian National Museum (or something much like it)